


wishbone

by hallotheism



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Force Ghosts, Gen, Post-Star Wars: The Force Awakens, so many force ghosts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-17
Updated: 2016-07-19
Packaged: 2018-07-24 14:38:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7512085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hallotheism/pseuds/hallotheism
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“She was very beautiful…” Rey says. “Kind, but sad.” Luke’s hand pauses as he reaches for his tepid tea. “I remember—I used to dream that she had these… small, white flowers, threaded through her hair…”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I watched TV. I had a Coke at the bar. I had four dreams in a row  
> where you were burned, about to burn, or still on fire.  
> — Richard Siken, from “Straw House, Straw Dog”

 i.             

“Were you always alone, on Jakku?” Luke asks her once, over dinner, distracted enough by something in the distance that he doesn’t realize how much the question might hurt. Rey pauses and thinks on how to answer him for a long moment. One thing she’s realized about training with Luke is that there is never a wasted breath under his teaching, not even for softer words—so somehow, in someway, this must matter.

“Yes, mostly.” she replies, blunt in return. “But I got used to it.”

Something in her voice must wake him to her again, because he flicks his gaze over and his blue blue eyes are bright and heavy in the dim light, like lamplight cutting through fog. "Loneliness can be its own lesson," he says. Rey shrugs. Everything is a lesson when you're teaching it yourself, she thinks.

When he looks away again, she glances down at her bowl and wipes it again with her thumb - just in case there’s still soup drippings stuck to the rim, just in case her stomach is tricking her again and she’s not really this full, just in case she doesn’t actually have to stop being hungry just yet. One can never be sure.

Luke hands her his bread roll without looking, thoughtlessly kind. He’s still distracted, eyes following a point over her shoulder. He tends to watch things like he’s only half there— but this is also something she’s used to; her teacher’s old mind wandering listless like a blind carro beast, tripping its way through the sand searching for another way home.

Luke blinks, comes back to himself. “Hm.” He blinks again. “Did you ever dream, there in the desert? When you were all alone?” He sounds serious, if a little hopeful, so she actually thinks about her answer for an extra beat. His eyes bore into her. She looks away before speaking.

“Sometimes I dreamt of people,” she says slowly, unsure of what he hopes to hear from her. The thing is, there are always ghosts on Jakku--it is called a graveyard for many reasons, but the bleach bone bodies trapped forever in its sands stands as the one that matters. She's not the only one to see the dead there, to listen. She thinks she may have been one of them for a while. 

But their dinner plates are empty and the tea is growing cold, and Rey feels like this is important, like a new lesson, and the air feels heavy like its listening in, so she doesn’t bother with any clean up just yet. 

Rey tears apart the bread roll as she talks. “I used to dream about a woman, for a long time. She used to sing to me when I couldn’t sleep. Lullabies about… the strangest things…,” she pauses, trying to remember the stories. “Sleeping queens and invisible monsters that ate men whole—great planets made of fire, and faraway lands…with fresh water that stretched as far as the eye could see.” Old memories seemed to spill unbidden from her lips. Its as if Rey had forgotten about the dream woman until this very moment. She bites into the thick bread, chewing slowly, savoring it, while her master listens. Rey wipes the crumbs from her lip as Luke gazes on, unblinking. Rey swallows.

“She was very beautiful…” she continues, pausing between bites. “Kind, but sad.” Luke’s hand pauses as he reaches for his tepid tea. Rey doesn’t notice, instead focusing on pulling a short strand of her tangled hair in front of her face. Her brow furrows. “I remember—I used to dream that she had these little, white flowers threaded through her hair…” Like stars in the dark, she doesn't say. 

Rey trails off. Luke has pulled his hand back from the cold cup on the floor and placed his flesh palm over his mouth. After a moment, he says, “I see,” so softly she almost misses it, and turns back to his tea. Rey blinks, and the tension in the air dissipates like a sigh. She does the rest of the cleanup in silence.

Later, when she falls asleep, she dreams— of a deep endless blue; like seawater, like smooth glass, like a woman’s gown made of shimmering silk. (Like starlight, reaching through the black.)

                                                                                                                 -

ii.          

Luke comes to her again, as she’s pulling herself from meditation on the edge of the rock ledge. She likes it here best, with the strange sounds of seabirds crying out over the crashing of hard water on rocks far, far, below from where she rests folded neatly, cross-legged. It makes her feel… infinite, her presence stretched out over the wide grey sky, like wings. It’s a new kind of isolation, out here. A better kind of solitude.

“Padawan, may I ask you something?” 

Her master’s voice from over her shoulder is overly formal, nervous in a way she hasn’t heard in a while. She turns, her back cracking slightly as she shifts her position. After a moment, she nods, and pats the ground beside her.

Luke dips his head and shuffles over next to her, visibly aware of the ledge while pretending not to be. Rey hides a smile. He settles into the meditation pose with an ease that continually surprises her, given his age.

She waits until he’s comfortable, before prompting. “Master?”

He pulls his grey hood back, tilting his face toward the wind. He breathes. “Yes, well. I was curious, after our conversation…over dinner. I apologize if I seemed…” he trails off, mouth twisting strangely.

“It’s alright,” she reassures him. “I didn’t mind.”

“Yes. Thank you. Still.” He shakes his head and sits up straighter. She does her best to copy him. The wind begins to whistle through the rocks at her side, and when he speaks again the words are almost too low for her to here, the air current catching them and ripping them away.

“Do you remember all your dreams?” Luke is hesitant, and his voice sounds very small. “Like the woman? When they spoke to you?”

She glances down at her hands for a moment. He’s told her about his jedi ghosts before, force apparitions that appear only to those who listen for them, who need them. Hers weren't like that, glowing soft and blue and gentle, her's were broken, hungry, haunting. Uncomfortably real. They didn't always behave like ghosts; they behaved like the dead--but Luke doesn't need to hear about those ones yet. The wind settles.

“Not always," she replies. "But sometimes, if I dreamt them more than once. There was the woman with the white flowers…and an old grandfather in dark robes.” Luke smiles slightly, a quirk of the lip. “There was a girl, too, I remember. Thin. Quiet. I only saw her when—“ _when I was hungry_ , Rey thinks, but doesn’t say it out loud. _Too hungry to move, too hungry to sleep. Waiting to die in the sun._

Luke, listening intently, closes his eyes. The wind picks up again. She wonders if he heard her in her head. He does that sometimes.

“It’s not so bad, really,” Rey assures him, just in case. “Before I knew about,” she waves her hand vaguely in his direction, “all _this_ … I just thought I was just going sand-mad. I saw it happen to a lot to the loners.”

“Sand-mad.” Luke says slowly, not really a question. He rolls the word around on his tongue, like it tastes familiar. His eyes are still closed tight.

She furrows her brow and tries to explain. Focusing on the salty sea around her, the cool air and the spray of water on her face, she remembers: “ Like the desert was trying to pull you out of yourself.”

Luke shifts slightly at her side, and nods at her to continue. Rey looks down at her clasped hands.

“The sun would turn thin and hard and the light would…wiggle, like it was dancing right in front of you. And suddenly the skin on your hands and face was just dust, and the air was dust and the water was dust and the heat would burn you out right through your bones, and the horizon line would shimmer and swallow you up,” she says, distantly. “And then your mind would dry out and crumble away in the wind, and never come back.”

“But you did.” She glances up. Her master’s eyes are open— that deep, clear blue that makes her think suddenly: _silk_. “You came back.”

Rey freezes, then nods, jerky. "Yes. I did." 

But what she doesn't say is this: _the desert didn't want me_. 

She doesn't say how easy it was to see the edge of the skyline and just... keep walking. She doesn’t tell him about the demon who followed after, that first night— with its charcoal burnt face and its chrome black hand, lumbering behind her in the heat like a mad dog. She was 10 years old, half crazy and horrified--what a _thing_ , this awful creature, and she knew it wasn’t real because real things, alive things, didn’t wear black on Jakku, nothing wore black on Jakku, black was bad luck, everyone knew that—and then the demon had pierced her with its sad yellow eyes and tried to speak, always trying to speak, but never saying anything—just that painful, rattling, metallic wheeze pushed through its ruined mouth. She doesn't tell her master about how it had limped along behind her as she wandered the desert, aimless, with its charred feet thumping unerringly in her own footprints, leaving the sand undisturbed, no evidence of any dying creature but her.

She doesn't tell her master about collapsing on the third day, miles away from the outpost, sprawled in the burning sand and hoping the monster would just kill her, just gobble her up fast, like the stories always said, and how it had simply knelt in the dust at her feet and brushed its burnt black hand through her hair, its fire yellow eyes—like twin suns—watching her with something like grief.

She doesn't tell him how she woke up a day later at the Niima outpost water well, propped up gently against the trough, the spray hitting the side of her face--Jakku’s pink moon high in the sky, and her, alone, with the smell of cooked flesh on her skin and shirt. She doesn't tell him how the smell made her hungry.

“Yes, well,” she says instead, and glances over at her master’s flesh hand, where it rests on his knee, white knuckled. “Sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes, after a while, people come back. But on Jakku they say it only ever happens once.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (so i have this weird thing for the concept that anakin's force ghost is split into two parts: the soft, peaceful looking blue spectre we see at the end of rotj, young and healthy and whole--and then the rest of him; the ugliest, most rotten pieces of his damaged spirit that culminated with the moment he broke on mustafar, left to wander the desert, burning. #sufferwithme)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> apologies for the mess! this is unbeta'd and i'll probs be back to edit it later

 

 **iii**.       Rey is 8 years old when she picks her own name.

 

For the first few months of her arrival on Jakku, the other scavengers name her whatever they want—‘you there’, ‘mouthful’, ‘half-bite’, ‘kit’—but when a Crolute male pats her roughly on the head, laughing, and calls her something that translates close enough to ‘dead-girl’, she bares her teeth and bites his hand hard enough to break the skin.

 

He roars in pain and backhands her into the dust, and goes to hit her again--but when she bares her teeth at him and licks his brackish blood from her mouth, ready to bite again, he drops his hand with a sneer and steps away.

 

No one calls her anything after that. So for a long while she is no one.

Its easier than she expected, like its happening to someone else, in some other place - sweating and thirsting and dying slowly under some other sun. Its... nice.

 

She is in the bowels of a hundred year old Kaminoan YT-class cargo freighter, levering herself down past hundreds and hundreds of empty, interconnected, honeycomb wall compartments—slowly, so slowly, so as not to disturb the thick dust coating on the edge of each coffin-shaped opening. (She sleeps in them sometimes, just big enough for her small body to stretch out when the sandstorms get too close to the outpost for comfort. She has no permanent shelter yet—the fallen AT-AT still ungutted on the edge of the dunes. She’s afraid to finish it; afraid of what it means.)

 

Her bare foot, wrapped in thick brown bandages to protect her from the blistering hot sand until she stops growing out of her boots, suddenly slip on one of the ledges, and in a flash her grip on the harness twists and loosens and she drops 15 levels before she gets the chance to scream, until the rope catches around her ankle with a jerk, and her head slams hard against the durasteel wall, and everything shudders and whites out, and—

 

“Your god must _really_ love you, huh?”

 

Rey opens her eyes, the pain in her head throbbing like a drumbeat, and the thin, brown, blur sharpens into a girl— not much older than her, quite similar really—only upside down.

 

“What—“ she tries, but her mouth simply opens and closes, no sound coming out. Blood is rushing to her head, and the stars dance angrily in front of her eyes. She blinks.

 

The other girl reaches out from where she sits, skinny legs draped over the edge of one of the honeycomb compartments, bare foot braced against the wall, and Rey’s vision swims until suddenly she blinks again and she’s lying on the cool metal insides of the opening, the girl curled across from her, thankfully right side up.

 

“Are you awake, now, clumsy girl?”

 

Rey nods, her headache protesting the move. She wants to thank her, but she can't speak just yet. 

 

“What do I call you, clumsy girl?”

 

Rey shifts herself up into a sitting position, slowly, ever so slowly, mirroring the girl across from her until both of them rest with their backs against the curved inner walls of the space, their legs folded so closely that Rey’s bandaged left foot rests between the other girl’s knees, carefully sharing the small compartment.

 

The blood drains from her brain bit by bit, and Rey closes her eyes again the spots in her vision. She shrugs one shoulder, the only part of her that doesn’t hurt. She knows what her name should be, she knows what it was, but it doesn’t feel like hers anymore. It does not hurt as much, to be no one.

 

The girl sighs. “You should always have a name,” she says, solemn. “Nameless things are never any good.”

 

Rey opens her eyes. The girl’s face is pinched and hard. For a moment, Rey imagines she’s looking at her own reflection, desert tan tunic draped over the same knobby knees and bird bone hands she looks at everyday, now right in front of her; reversed. But she’s a shade too dark, her skin a soft nut brown with sun-spot freckles scattered like stars across the bridge of her nose, and they could be sister’s maybe, about the same age—but something about her seems older, too old for the body she’s in.

 

She shrugs again, her head starting to clear. Rey doesn’t want to speak her name out loud quite yet. It doesn’t belong on anyone else’s lips. It seems too fragile.

 

“What’s yours?” She asks instead, softly.   The girl taps her feet against the durasteel plating, the sound echoing strangely, and says “shu-mee-ah” and then a jumble of letters too fast to parse out.

 

Rey’s expression must be too obvious in its bewilderment, because the girl laughs. “It sounds even sillier in Basic.”

 

Casual conversation is unfamiliar too her these days; Rey flounders for something else to say. “Is it a… family name?” The words send a pang through her chest. She hadn't realized there were any other humans at Niima's outpost. Especially one so kind.

 

“Not exactly.” The girl’s smile softens. “My people choose their own names, but it’s different for each of us—specific feelings or actions. They do not always translate well.”

 

Rey finds herself leaning forward. “What does yours mean?” The other girl pauses, and Rey hurries to add: “I’m sorry. Is it a secret?” Rey could understand that more than most.

 

“No. No, of course not.” The girl blinks. “I just haven’t thought about it—it was forgotten for such a long time. For a while I think I forgot it was ever mine.”

 

Rey nods gravely.

 

The girl pats her feet on the metal again, one-two-one-two-one-two, like a dance, and says, “I think, if I were to describe it in words…it would be something like—running. Like that…breathless moment, in between one long stride and the next,” she raises both hands and spreads them wide, “when both feet have left the ground, for a split second, and you feel like flying. Like, in that instant, you could keep running forever, farther than every horizon. Like if you run far enough, you’ll look down and have wings…”

 

The girl drops her hands, trailing off. Rey’s mouth is dry, she can so clearly see it, the image sketched into her bones when she looks at the girl now.

 

“Say it again—your name. Please.” The girl complies, and Rey spends a long moment curling her mouth around the strange vowels until she thinks she gets it right. She’ll have to practice.

 

The girl laughs at her pronunciation, albeit fondly. “Close enough. But don’t worry; my son could never get it quite right either. You have to grow up hearing the sounds around you, it seems.” Her smiles turns unbearably sad. “He never got that. He only ever knew my name in Basic—names are carried by the mothers, you see.”

 

Rey frowns in confusion, and looks at the girl closely. She is too young to have given birth, Rey knows this with a surety she cannot explain. “You’re a mother?”

 

“I was, a long time ago.”

 

“But not anymore,” Rey asks, confused. The girl’s face suddenly seems much older, the lines on her skin more pronounced, until Rey blinks, and she’s young again.

 

Her mind flashes to the mad old woman in the Niima market, muttering about ghost stories to anyone who will listen, how the Jakku dead like to talk, and take, how the Jakku dead are hungry, too, and suddenly Rey feels very cold.

 

“You’re not ...real, are you,” she asks dully. The girl smiles sadly and shrugs.

 

“I’m sure I used to be. But don’t be scared.”

 

Rey scowls on reflex. “I’m not scared,” she mutters, even though she is. The fond grin on the other girl’s face makes her scowl harder.

 

“I'm sorry. You're just...you remind me of someone.”

 

“Are they dead, too?” Rey asks, before her brain catches up with her.

 

“Yes.” The girl answers simply. “For a while now, I think.”

 

They sit in silence, the sound of the sand blowing through the gaping holes in the old freighter cutting through the quiet. Rey is sitting in front of a ghost girl with an unspeakable name, in the heart of a hulking skeleton ship, talking about nothing, absolutely nothing, like this is utterly normal, and next thing she knows they’ll be discussing the weather—and for a moment she wonders if her slip and fall really did kill her; maybe the rope never caught her at all, and her body is actually splattered on the sand a hundred yards below. But when she shifts herself to one side to take a look over the ledge and check, just in case, she decides her body aches far too much to be dead, anyway.

 

Rey feels curiously numb about it at this point. She settles back. The girl is still watching her.

 

“You have questions, my clumsy girl. Ask them. I am lonely, too.”

 

Rey thinks for a long moment before she decides to speak.

 

“If you were a mother once,” she asks carefully, “why do you look like a girl?”

 

The girl’s eyes crinkle, and for a second they look very dark, like two holes punched into the ship wall. “Because I was a girl first, up until I wasn’t. And no one ever remembers that.”

 

The hairs on the back on Rey’s neck lift, slightly. She swallows, and her throat clicks.

 

“Why are you still here?”

 

 The girl leans back against the wall. "I was born in the desert, and I died in it, too. I imagine I will rest eternal within the Rim and all it's yellow sands until the twin suns burn out." She says it like a prayer. Rey squints, and a smooth line of white appears on the ghost's wrists, like shackles sunken deep into the skin. But then the girl shifts again; they disappear. "But you don't know my sibling suns here, do you? How sad. A duel sunset is... quite lovely, really."

 Rey frowns. The dead on Jakku are here because their bones are still trapped; swallowed up by the dune pits before their spirits can escape. Jakku is called a graveyard for a reason. Everyone knows this. "So you don't belong here." The girl shakes her head, still smiling softly. "Then why are you still...?" 

 

The girl’s smile turns ugly, and she glances to the side, at Rey’s twisted, empty harness where it floats over the open chasm. “Because I have a god who loves me, too.” Her voice is bitter.

 

Rey knows all about the desert gods, how carefully scavengers speak of them—the dust god and the walking god and the greedy bright god of death, and so, wary, she asks the ghost, “which one?”

 

And the girl says, “the only one that matters.”

 

Rey’s not quite sure what that means, but the girl has already turned away, looking down at the void below. Rey’s fingertips are icy cold, and her headache is fading more with each moment, but her ankle is turning the ugly purpleblue that says she won’t be climbing down for a while. The sun is starting to set, she can see the angles of the light thinning along the inner walls of the freighter. She hasn’t eaten in a day and a half, and she’s suddenly so _tired_ , all the way down to her bones.

 

“You need to rest, ” says the girl, abruptly. The motherly hand that presses itself against Rey’s forehead, unerringly gentle, makes her eyes sting. “I will stay to be sure that you wake.” The ghost’s tone is firm, and the hand on her forehead falls down to curve around Rey’s cheek; the touch unexpectedly warm, if not-quite-there.

 

Rey can feel herself succumbing. Her eyes slip closed, and she wonders why she’s no longer afraid to spend the night in the dark with a dead girl. She mentally shrugs, uncaring, and tilts her head back, but before she lets the exhaustion pulls her under, she asks one more time: “Can you say it again? Your name?”

 

The ghost doesn’t answer at first, but when she does, the pronunciation is slower, and she only says the second part. Rey catches some of the sounds, but she knows she won’t remember them tomorrow.

 

“What about the beginning? Shah-mee-ha?”

 

“ _Sh-mii_. In my people’s tongue, it is only a form of greeting. ‘ _my name is’_ followed by—“ she says the second half again, too fast. “But when I was stolen from my family, the meaning was lost until it merely became another silly thing to call me, an easier thing in Basic, to make it simpler for another's use.”  

 

The ghost’s hands brush through Rey’s hair, tender. “I am tired of being used. They forget that it was my name first.”

 

A swell of sand rattles against the outer shell of the ship before settling. Already half-asleep, Rey can sense a dust storm brewing in the distance, although she’s not sure how.

 

“ _Rey_ , my clumsy girl,” the ghost whispers, and Rey wonders how long she's has known, “remember this—there is _power_ in a name. It’s why the god wanted me from the start.”

 

Rey wants to ask the ghost, _say it again? your name? just one more time, please_ —but then the exhaustion pulls her under, and she forgets.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (tbh i started this whole thing just so i could write this scene)


End file.
